Hyperbole Is My Middle Name!

connorratliff:

improvnonsense:

I get in trouble for saying that because I deliberately say it in a jerk manner. KNOW EVERYTHING. When someone says “I didn’t know the movie my partner was mentioning” I’ll sometimes say “Well, you don’t HAVE to know it but it would be easier if you knew it.”

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Most of the people I have improvised with are younger than me, sometimes by 10 or 15 years. That’s what made me sensitive REAL quick to how certain kinds of pop culture references can be tricky.

I remember an early practice with my indie team, (Secret Man Group), in which I made — FOR SOME REASON I CANNOT RECALL— a reference to Season One of the television series Newhart, which is an ‘old’ reference, even for me. The look of bewilderment on the faces of my teammates let me know that I had gone too far.

On both of my Harold teams last year, CAPTCHA and Dance Break, there were numerous times when scenes would venture into areas where literally the entire team would all be familiar with a certain song or TV reference and I would be forced to go along and do my best to bluff or adapt or somehow deal with it. The back-up plan for “knowing everything” is learning how to fake it or sometimes even just being willing to admit in a scene that you don’t know something (if you feel that the admission won’t wreck or derail the scene.)

I think beyond pop culture or “reference-prov”, the most important take-away is that it every improviser can benefit from just improving their General Knowledge. There are many reasons why people are blown away by Neil Casey but one of them is certainly that he’s a guy who knows a lot and he can talk about a wide variety of topics with confidence.

I know no better way to elicit howls of laughter from an audience than to correctly perform basic arithmetic on stage— IT ALWAYS GETS A LAUGH. If a scene suddenly requires some math, and you do that math quickly and confidently, the audience LOVES you for it.

ONE THING I NOTICED: in the past 12 months, I have witnessed at least two different improv sets where one person initiated a scene aboard the space shuttle Challenger  and then the other person in the scene did something like set the scene on the moon where the shuttle had already landed. I know there are ways of recovering from this, but in both cases you could tell that a big chunk of the audience was instantly thinking “oh, these people don’t know that the Challenger blew up.” Both scenes ended up falling apart a bit, in part because the person who initiated it ended up trying to then figure out “oh, I guess we’re in an alternate reality where the Challenger didn’t blow up, or maybe this is a different shuttle that just happens to be called Challenger, or….” Those in the audience who, like the 2nd person in those scenes, didn’t know anything about Challenger may not have known anything except that the scenes weren’t quite clicking.

Anyway, I don’t have an overall point to make except that Challenger was the space shuttle that blew up shortly after lift-off, and it was the one with the schoolteacher on it and everybody died and it was awful. So when someone initiates their comedy scene about this, now you know that stuff.

I’ll cop to the Challenger thing, I am sure I was a dick about the scene partner who didn’t know that it exploded. Sounds like something I would do, plus it was Kscope show, where all my worst habits come out to play.

Edit: Connor says he wasn’t thinking of this show… which just goes to show that everyone should have a working knowledge of the Challenger disaster.